Personae Separatae – Triptych

“WOSSY” CONMIGO EN “ALMORA”, EALING, LONDRES 1962 – PANEL 1 “PERSONAE SEPARATAE” TRIPTYCH (acrylic and oil stick on canvas 120cm x 150cm)

“WOSSY” CONMIGO EN BUENOS AIRES, 1987 – PANEL 2 “PERSONAE SEPARATAE” TRIPTYCH (acrylic and oil stick on canvas 120cm x 150cm)

“WOSSY” CONMIGO EN BUENOS AIRES, 2012 – PANEL 3 “PERSONAE SEPARATAE” TRIPTYCH (acrylic and oil stick, pencil, newspapercollage and masking tape on canvas 120cm x 150cm)

Personae separatae

Like the scale of gold that breaks away from sombre distance and meltingly runs on the corridor of the Judas-trees by now charred skeletons, are we the same, personages divided by the gaze of another?

“The “Almora” (“Personae separatae”) triptych, painted in a light, limpid and hauntingly tender style, evokes a mysterious and elusive world which is either lost or cannot quite fully be grasped or experienced, unlike say the Crucifixion triptych which is all too painfully and violently experienced.”

“This second panel in Brian Fogarty’s ‘Personae separatae’ triptych, with the insignificant figure of the painter/poet as always reduced to being a witness or mere voyeur of his muse Wossy’s life (whether real or imagined by him) from a distance, is, like the other two panels imbued with pathos and a powerful nostalgia for a world twenty-five years earlier, in London, he has only imagined, but never knows; so now he yearns for what he has probably never had, a world which lies nowhere in a never-never-land, and which, but for this painting, and his handful of poems, would, like a last will and testament, perish with the imminent death of its mortally sick creator; and yet, in the tango, which is both the dance of life and of death, there is a melancholy duende, or passion, and one can’t help but wonder, is the girl Wossy who seemed so carefree twenty-five years earlier on the swing in the garden of Almora in the first panel, even while she dances with another partner, perhaps her husband, day dreaming of the poet?

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